Amglish In Like Ten Easy Lessons A Celebration

Of The New World Lingo Arthur E Rowse download

https://ebookbell.com/product/amglish-in-like-ten-easy-lessons-a-
celebration-of-the-new-world-lingo-arthur-e-rowse-2506328

Explore and download more ebooks at ebookbell.com

Here are some recommended products that we believe you will be
interested in. You can click the link to download.

Amglish In Like Ten Easy Lessons Arthur E Rowse

https://ebookbell.com/product/amglish-in-like-ten-easy-lessons-arthur-
e-rowse-232816628
Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
 Sanson was the English geographer Peter
Heylin, whose map, as has already been
noted, betrays no knowledge of Champlain.
His Cosmographie in Four Books appeared in
1657,[766] and the second part of the fourth
book relates to America, and is accompanied
by the map in question. The contemporary
VISSCHER. Dutch maps of Jannson, Visscher, and Blaeu
deserve little notice as contributions to
knowledge.[767]

EASTERLY PORTION OF CHAMPLAIN’S MAP 1632.

The great map of 1632, by Champlain, has been reproduced full
size in the Quebec edition of his works, and also in the Prince
Society edition. A fac-simile, somewhat reduced, is given in
O’Callaghan’s Documentary History of New York, vol. iii. Another,
full size, was made by Pilinski in 1860, and published by Tross, of
Paris (thirty-six copies, and of date, 1877, fifty copies at 40 francs).
Field calls it “imperfect.” Brunet, however, says it has “une
admirable exactitude.” The copy of the 1632 edition in the
Bibliothèque Nationale lacks this map. The Harvard Le Mur copy
has no map (Field, Indian Bibliography, no. 268).
Sabin (no. 11,839) says that the map here copied (the original of
which is in the Harvard College “Collet” copy) belongs properly to
the copies having the Le Mur and Sevestre imprints, and has the
legend, “Faict l’an 1632 par le Sieur de Champlain;” while the
proper Collet map is smaller, and is inscribed, “Faict par le Sieur de
Champlain, suivant les Mémoires de P. du Val, en l’Isle du Palais.”
The earliest copy, however, which I have found of the map thus
referred to bears date 1664, and is called Le Canada, faict par le Sr.
de Champlain, ... suivant les Mémoires de P. du Val, Géographe du
Roy. This map appeared with even later dates (1677, etc.),
preserving much of the characteristics of the 1632 map, though
stretching the plot farther west, and at a time when much better
knowledge was current. Harrisse, nos. 331, 348; but cf. no. 274.
Kohl, in the Department of State Collection, has one of date 1660.

WESTERLY PORTION OF CHAMPLAIN’S 1632 MAP.

 DUDLEY, 1647.

Of the map of Creuxius, made in 1660 and published in 1664, a

fac-simile of a part is annexed.[768] For the eastern parts of the
country reference may be made to the map Tabula Novæ Franciæ, of
about 1663, given in the chapter on Acadie.[769]
 CREUXIUS, 1660.

CARTE GÉNÉRALE OF COVENS AND MORTIER.]

One of the volumes of the great Blaeu Atlas of 1662, America,

quæ est Geographiæ Blavianæ Pars quinta, very singularly ignored all
that the cartographers of New France had been long divulging, and
the same misrepresentation was persistently employed in the later
Blaeu Atlas of 1685, which contained in other American maps a
variety of notions equally erroneous, and which had been current at a
period very long passed.
The map in Montanus’s De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld, 1670,
“per Jacobum Meursium,” not the same as the “Novissima et
accuratissima totius Americæ Descriptio” of John Ogilby’s great folio
on America, 1670, and later years, seems to be substantially N.
 Visscher’s map of the same title,
issued in Amsterdam in the same
year.[770]
The maps of Hennepin (1683-
1697) form a part of a special note
elsewhere in the present volume;
and the map accompanying Le
Clercq’s Etablissement de la Foy,
GOTTFRIED, 1655.
1691, is also reproduced in Shea’s
translation of that book.[771] It
makes the Mississippi debouch on the Texas shore of the Gulf of
Mexico, as many of the maps of this period do.
Maps of a general character, indicating a knowledge of the interior
topography of America, sometimes expanding, and not seldom
retrograde, followed rapidly as the century was closing, of which the
most important were the maps of Amérique septentrionale (1667,
1669, 1674, 1685, 1690, 1692, 1695), by the Sansons, and the
Roman reprint of it in 1677,[772] as well as La Mer du Nort of Du Val
in 1679,[773] Sanson’s Le Nouveau Mexique, of the same year, which
extends from Montreal to the Gulf;[774] the North America of the
English geographer, William Berry (1680);[775] the Partie de la
Nouvelle France of Hubert Jaillott (1685);[776] and the same
cartographer’s Amérique septentrionale of 1694, and Le Monde of
1696; the Carte Generalle de la Nouvelle France[777] (1692) engraved
by Boudan; the Amérique septentrionale of De Fer (1693); the marine
Cartes (1696) of Le Cordier;[778] the New Sett of Maps published by
Edward Wells in London in 1698-99; and finally the Amérique
septentrionale of Delisle.[779] The maps of La Hontan (1703-1709)
are the subject of special treatment in another note.
 SANSON, 1656.
This is the same map, whether with the imprint, “Paris, chez Pierre
Mariette, 1656,” or “Chez l’Autheur” in his America en plusieurs
Cartes, 1657, though the scale in the former is much larger.

BLAEU, 1662 AND 1685.

Cf. a section in Cassell’s United States, i. 312.
 NOVI BELGII TABULA, 1670.
From Ogilby’s America, p. 169.

OGILBY’S MAP, 1670.

 If we run through the series of maps here sketched, we cannot
but be struck with the unsettled notions regarding the geography of
the St. Lawrence Valley. Beginning with the clear intimation by
Molineaux, in 1600, of a great body of interior water, which was the
mysterious link between the Atlantic and the Arctic seas, and finding
this idea modified by Botero and others, we see Champlain in 1613
still leaving it vague. The maps of the next few years paid little
attention to any features farther west than the limit of tide-water; and
not till we reach the great map which accompanied the final edition of
Champlain’s collected voyages in 1632 do we begin to get a distorted
plot of the upper lakes, Lake Erie being nothing more than a channel
of varying width connecting them with Lake Huron. The first really
serviceable delineation of the great lakes were the maps of Sanson
and Du Creux, or Creuxius, in 1656 and 1660. Here we find Lake Erie
given its due prominence; Huron is unduly large, but in its right
position; and Michigan and Superior, though not completed, are
placed with approximate accuracy. This truth of position, however,
was disregarded by many a later geographer, till we reach a type of
map, about the end of the century, which is exemplified in that given
by Campanius in 1702.
 FROM CAMPANIUS, 1702.

A water-way which made an island of greater or less extent of the

peninsula which lies between the St. Lawrence and the Atlantic,
appeared first in 1600 on the Molineaux map, and was repeated by
Dudley in 1647; but on other maps the water-sheds were separated
by a narrow tract. So much uncertainty attended this feature that the
short portage of the prevailing notion was far from constant in its
position, and on some maps seems repeated in more than one place,
—taking now the appearance of a connection on the line of the St.
Croix, or some other river of New Brunswick; now on that of the
Kennebec and Chaudière; again as if having some connection with
Lake Champlain, when a misconception of its true position placed that
expanse of water between the Connecticut and the Saco; and once
more on the line of the Hudson and Lake George.
 CHAPTER VIII.
NEW NETHERLAND, OR THE DUTCH IN NORTH
AMERICA
BY BERTHOLD FERNOW,
Keeper of the Historical Records, State of New York.

S
AYS Carlyle: “Those Dutch are a strong people. They raised their
land out of a marsh, and went on for a long period of time
breeding cows and making cheese, and might have gone on
with their cows and cheese till doomsday. But Spain comes over
and says, ‘We want you to believe in St. Ignatius.’ ‘Very sorry,’ replied
the Dutch, ‘but we can’t.’ ‘God! but you must,’ says Spain; and they
went about with guns and swords to make the Dutch believe in St.
Ignatius. Never made them believe in him, but did succeed in
breaking their own vertebral column forever, and raising the Dutch
into a great nation.”
A nation’s struggle for religious liberty comes upon every individual
member of that nation as a personal matter, as a battle to be fought
with himself and with the world. Hence we see the Dutch,
encouraged by the large influx of Belgians whom the same
unwillingness to believe in St. Ignatius had driven out of their homes,
emerge from the conflict with Spain, individually and as a nation,
more self-reliant, sturdy, and independent than ever before.
 Compelled by the physical condition of their country to become a
maritime nation, while other circumstances directed them to
commercial pursuits, they had long been the common carriers of the
sea, and had availed themselves at an early date of the discoveries
made by the Cabots, Verrazano, and other adventurous explorers in
the century succeeding the voyages of Columbus. They had studied
the weak points of that vast Spanish empire “where the sun never
set,” and found in the war with Spain a good excuse to make use of
their knowledge, and to send their ships to the West Indies and the
Spanish main to prey upon the commerce of their enemies. The first
proposition to make such an expedition, submitted to the States-
General in 1581 by an English sea-captain, Beets, and refused by
them, was undoubtedly conceived in a purely commercial spirit.
Gradually the idea of destroying the transatlantic resources of Spain,
and thereby compelling her to submit to the Dutch conditions of
peace and to the evacuation of Belgium, caused the formation of a
West India company, which, authorized to trade with and fight the
Spaniards in American waters, appears in the light of a necessary
political measure, without, however, throwing in the background the
necessity of finding a shorter route to the East Indies.[780]
Although the scheme to form a West India company was first
broached in 1592 by William Usselinx, an exiled Antwerp merchant, it
was many years before it could be carried out. The longing for a
share in the riches of the New World conduced in the mean time to
the establishment of the “Greenland Company” about 1596, and the
pretended search by its ships for a northwest passage led to a
supposed first discovery of the Hudson River, if we may rely upon an
unsupported statement made by officers of the West India Company
in an appeal for assistance to the Assembly of the Nineteen in 1644.
According to this document, ships of the Greenland Company had
entered the North and Delaware rivers in 1598; their crews had
landed in both places, and had built small forts to protect them
against the inclemency of the winter and to resist the attacks of the
Indians.
Of the next adventurer who sailed through the Narrows we know
more, and of his discoveries we have documentary evidence. A
company of English merchants had organized to trade to America in
the first years of the seventeenth century. Their first adventures,
directed to Guiana and Virginia, were not successful,[781] yet gave a
new impetus to the scheme originally conceived by Usselinx. A plan
for the organization of a West India company was drawn up in 1606,
according to the exiled Belgian’s ideas. The company was to be in
existence thirty-six years, to receive during the first six years
assistance from all the United Provinces, and to be managed in the
same manner as the East India Company. Political considerations on
one side and rivalry between the Provinces on the other prevented
the consummation of this project. A peace or truce with Spain was
about to be negotiated, and Oldenbarnevelt, then Advocate of
Holland and one of the most prominent and influential members of
the peace party, foresaw that the organization of a West India
company with the avowed purpose of obtaining most of its profits by
preying on Spanish commerce in American waters would only prolong
the war. Probably he saw still farther. Usselinx’s plan was, as we have
seen, to compel Spain by these means to evacuate Belgium, and thus
give her exiled sons a chance to return to their old homes. A
wholesale departure of the shrewd, industrious, and skilled Belgians
would have deprived Holland of her political pre-eminence and have
left her an obscure and isolated province. On the other hand, each
province and each seaport desired a share in the equipping of the
fleet destined to sail in the interests of the proposed company, and as
no province was willing to allow a rival to have what she could not
have, the project itself between these two extremes of the opposing
parties came to nought. It was only when Oldenbarnevelt, accused of
high treason, had been lodged in prison, and the renewal of the war
with Spain had been commended to the public, that the scheme was
taken up again, in 1618.
Private ships, sailing from Dutch ports, had not been idle in the
mean time; in 1607 we hear of them in Canada trading for furs, and
in 1609 an English mariner, Henry Hudson, who had made several
voyages for the English company already mentioned, offered his
services to the East India Company to search for the passage to India
by the north.
 Under the auspices of the Amsterdam chamber of this company
Hudson left the Texel in the yacht “Half Moon” April 4, 1609. His
failures in the years 1607 and 1608, while in the employ of the
English company, had discouraged neither him nor his new
employers; but soon ice and fogs compel him, so we are told, to
abandon his original plan to go to the East Indies by a possible
northeast passage, and he proposes to his crew a search for a
northwest passage along the American coast, at about the 40th
degree of latitude. A contemporary writer states: “This idea had been
suggested to Hudson by some letters and maps which his friend
Captain Smith had sent him from Virginia, and by which he informed
him that there was a sea leading into the Western Ocean by the north
of Virginia.” So westward Hudson turns the bow of his ship, to make a
first landfall on the coast of Newfoundland, a second at Penobscot
Bay, and a third at Cape Cod. Thence he takes a southwest course,
but again fails to strike land under the 40th degree; he has gone too
far south by one degree, and he anchors in a wide bay under 39° 5″
on the 28th of August. He is in Delaware Bay. Scarcely a week later,
on the 4th of September, he finds himself with his yacht in the “Great
North River of New Netherland,” under 40° 30´. A month later, to a
day, he passes again out of the “Great mouth of the Great River,”
homeward bound to report that what he had thought to be the long
and vainly sought northwest passage was only a great river, navigable
for vessels of light draught for one hundred and fifty miles, and
running through a country fair to look upon and inhabited by red men
peacefully inclined. Little did Hudson think, while he was navigating
the waters named for him, that Champlain, another explorer, had
recently been fighting his way up the shores of the lake now bearing
his name, and that, a century and a half later, the great battle for
supremacy on this continent between France and England,—between
the old religion and the new,—would be fiercely waged in those
peaceful regions.
The report brought home by Hudson, that the newly discovered
country abounded in fur-bearing animals, created the wildest
excitement among a people compelled by their northern climate to
resort to very warm clothing in winter. Many private ventures,
therefore, followed Hudson’s track soon after his return, and finally
the plan to organize a West India company, never quite relinquished,
was now, 1618, destined to be carried out. There was in this juncture
less opposition to it; but still various reasons delayed the consent of
the States-General until June, 1621, when at last they signed the
charter. Englishmen from Virginia, who claimed the country under a
grant, had tried to oust the Dutch, who had before this established
themselves on the banks of the Hudson, under the octroi of 1614.
The West India Company nevertheless, undismayed, took possession,
in 1623, by sending Captain Cornelis Jacobsen Mey as director to the
Prince Hendrick or South River (Delaware), and Adrian Jorissen
Tienpont in like capacity to the Prince Mauritius or North River. Mey,
going up the South River, fifteen leagues from its mouth erected in
the present town of Gloucester, N. J., about four miles below
Philadelphia, Fort Nassau, the first European settlement in that
region; while the director on the North River, besides strengthening
the establishment which he found at its mouth, built a fort a few
miles above the one erected in 1618 near the mouth of the
Normanskil, now Albany, by the servants of the “United New
Netherland Company,” and called it “Fort Orange.”
Tienpont’s successor, Peter Minuit,
three years later, in 1626, bought from
the Indians the whole of Manhattan
Island for the value of about twenty-four dollars, with the view of
making this the principal settlement. This purchase and the
organization, under the charter, of a council with supreme executive,
legislative, and judicial authority, must be considered the first
foundation of our present State of New York, even though the titles of
the officers constituting the council,—upper and under merchant,
commissary, book-keeper of monthly wages,—seem to prove that in
the beginning the Company had only purely commercial ends in view.
Their charter of 1621, it is true, required them “to advance the
peopling of those fruitful and unsettled parts,” but not until the trade
with New Netherland threatened to become unprofitable, in 1627-28,
was a plan taken into consideration to reap other benefits than those
accruing from the fur-trade alone, through a more extended
colonization. The deliberations of the Assembly of the Nineteen and
directors of the West India Company resulted in a new “charter of
freedoms and exemptions,” sanctioned by the States-General, June 7,
1629. Its provisions, no more favorable to liberty, as we understand it
now, than that of 1621, attempted to transplant to the soil of New
York the feudal system of Europe as it had already been established
in Canada; and with it was imported the first germ of that weakening
disease,—inadequate revenues,—which caused the colony to fall such
an easy prey to England’s attack in 1664. While the charter was still
under discussion, several of the Company’s directors took advantage
of their position and secured for themselves a share of the new
privileges by purchasing from the Indians, as the charter required, the
most conveniently located and fertile tracts of land. The records of
the acknowledgment of these transactions before the Director and
Council of the Colony are the earliest which are extant in the original
now in the possession of the State of New York. They bear dates from
April, 1630, to July, 1631, and include the present counties of Albany
and Richmond, N. Y., the cities of Hoboken and Jersey City, N. J., and
the southern parts of the States of New Jersey and Delaware.
This mode of acquiring lands from the Indians by purchase
established from the beginning the principles by which the intercourse
between the white and the red men in the valley of the Hudson was
to be regulated. The great Indian problem, which has been and still is
a question of paramount importance to the United States
Government, was solved then by the Dutch of New Netherland
without great difficulty. Persecuted by Spain and France for their
religious convictions, the Dutch had learned to tolerate the
superstitions and even repugnant beliefs of others. Not less religious
than the Puritans of New England, they made no such religious
pretexts for tyranny and cruelty as mar the records of their neighbors.
They treated the Indian as a man with rights of life, liberty, opinion,
and property like their own. Truthful among themselves, they inspired
in the Indian a belief in their sincerity and honesty, and purchased
what they wanted fairly and with the consent of the seller. The Dutch
régime always upheld this principle, and as a consequence the
Indians of this State caused no further difficulty, with a few
exceptions, to the settlers than a financial outlay. The historians who
charge the Dutch with pusillanimity and cowardice in their dealings
with the Indians forget that to their policy we owe to-day the
existence of the United States.
The country between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mississippi River,
the Great Lakes and the Savannah River, was at the time of the arrival
of the Dutch practically ruled by a confederacy of Indian tribes,—the
Five Nations,—who, settled along the Mohawk and Upper Hudson
rivers and in western New York, commanded the key to the continent.
It was indeed in their power, had they pleased, to allow the French of
Canada to crush the Dutch settlements on the Hudson; and had this
territory become a French province, the united action of the American
colonies in the French and Revolutionary wars would have been an
impossibility. These Five Nations, called by the Jesuit fathers living
among them the most enlightened but also the most intractable and
ferocious of all the Indians, became soon after the arrival of the
Dutch the stanch friends of the new-comers, and remained so during
the whole Dutch period. The English wisely adhered to this Indian
policy of the Dutch, and by the continued friendship of the Five
Nations were enabled successfully to contend with the French for the
supremacy on this continent.
The purchasers of the tracts already mentioned—with one
exception, associations of Dutch merchants—lost no time in sending
out people to settle their colonies. Renselaerswyck, adjoining and
surrounding Fort Orange, had in 1630 already a population of thirty
males, of whom several had families, sent out by the Association
recognizing Kilian van Renselaer, a pearl merchant of Amsterdam, as
patroon. The same men, associated with several others, among
whom was Captain David Pietersen de Vries, had bought the present
counties of Sussex and Kent, in the State of Delaware, to which by a
purchase made the following year they added the present Cape May
County, N. J. On December 12, 1630, they sent two vessels to the
Delaware or South River, “to plant a colony for the cultivation of grain
and tobacco, as well as to carry on the whale-fishery in that region.”
They carried out the first part of the plan, but were so unsuccessful in
the second part that the expedition proved a losing one. Undismayed
by their financial loss, another was sent out in May, 1632, under
Captain de Vries’ personal command, although information had been
received that the settlement on the South River, Zwanendael, had
been destroyed by the Indians, and all the settlers, thirty-two in
number, killed. Arriving opposite Zwanendael, De Vries found the
news but too true; and after visiting the old Fort Nassau, now
deserted, and loitering a while in the river, he left the region without
any further attempt at colonization. The pecuniary losses attending
these two unfortunate expeditions induced the patroons of
Zwanendael, two years later, to dispose of their right and title to
these tracts of land to the West India Company.
Shortly before Minuit was appointed
director of New Netherland, a number
of Walloons, compelled by French
intolerance to leave their homes
between the rivers Scheldt and Lys,
had applied to Sir Dudley Carleton, principal Secretary of State to
King Charles I., for permission to settle in Virginia. The answer of the
Virginia Company not proving satisfactory, they turned their eyes
upon New Netherland, where a small number of them arrived with
Minuit. For some reasons they left the lands first allotted to them on
Staten Island, and went over to Long Island, where Wallabout,[782] in
the city of Brooklyn, still reminds us of the origin of its first settlers. It
will be remembered that Englishmen from Virginia (under Captain
Samuel Argal, in 1613) had attempted to drive the Dutch from the
Hudson River.[783] It is said that the Dutch then acknowledged the
English title to this region under a grant of Queen Elizabeth to Sir
Walter Raleigh in 1584, and made an arrangement for their
continuing there on sufferance. Be that as it may, the West India
Company had paid no heed to this early warning. Now, in 1627, the
matter was to be recalled to their minds in a manner more diplomatic
than Argal’s, by a letter from Governor Bradford of Plymouth Colony,
which most earnestly asserted the right of the English to the territory
occupied by the Dutch. This urged the latter to clear their title, for
otherwise it said: “It will be harder and with more difficulty obtained
hereafter, and perhaps not without blows.” Before the director’s
appeal for assistance against possible English invaders reached the
home office, the Company had already taken steps to remove some
of the causes which might endanger their colony. They had obtained,
September, 1627, from King Charles I. an order giving to their vessels
the same privileges as had been granted by the treaty of
Southampton to all national vessels of Holland,—that is, freedom of
trade to all ports of England and her colonies. But their title to New
Netherland was not cleared, because they could not do it; for they did
not dare to assert the pretensions to the premier seisin, then
considered valid according to that maxim of the civil law, “quæ nullius
sunt, in bonis dantur occupanti;” nor did they later claim the right of
first discovery when, after the surrender of New Netherland to the
English, in 1664, negotiations were had concerning restitution. Only
once did they claim a title by such discovery. This was when the ship
“Union,” bringing home the recalled director Minuit (1632), was
attached in an English port, at the suit of the New England Company,
on a charge which had been made notwithstanding the King’s order
of September, 1627, and which alleged that the ship had obtained her
cargo in countries subject to his Majesty. The denial of this claim and
the counter claim of first discovery by Englishmen set up by the
British ministry failed to bring forth a rejoinder from their High
Mightinesses of Holland.
When De Vries, having ascertained
the destruction of his colony on the
Delaware, came to New Amsterdam, he
found there the newly appointed
director, Wouter van Twiller, just
arrived. He was, as De Vries thought,
“an unfit person,” whom family influence had suddenly raised from a
clerkship in the Company’s office at Amsterdam to the governorship
of New Netherland “to perform a comedy,” and his council De Vries
calls “a pack of fools, who knew nothing except to drink, by whose
management the Company must come to nought.” De Vries’
prediction came near being realized. Seized with a mania for territorial
aggrandizement, Van Twiller bought from the Indians a part of the
Connecticut territory in 1633, and by building Fort Hope, near the
present site of Hartford, planted the seed for another quarrel with the
English at Boston, who claimed all the land from the Narragansetts
nearly to the Manhattans under a grant made in 1631 to the Earl of
Warwick, and under a subsequent transfer from the latter in 1632 to
Lord Say and Seal’s company. Notwithstanding their numerical
weakness, the Dutch kept a footing in Connecticut for nearly twenty
years; but they could not prevent the same Englishmen from invading
Long Island in a like manner, and being prominent actors in the final
catastrophe of 1664. Another purchase made by Van Twiller from the
Indians, also in 1633, which included the territory on the Schuylkill,
the building of Fort Beeversreede there and additions made to Fort
Nassau, put new life into the sinking settlement on the Delaware
River, and thus gave color to the subsequent statement, made in the
dispute with the Swedes, that they (the Dutch) had never
relinquished their hold upon this territory.[784] Thoroughly imbued
with a sense of the wealth and power of the West India Company,
then in the zenith of its power, Van Twiller expended the revenues of
his government lavishly in building up New Amsterdam and Fort
Orange, and, without regard for official ethics, abused his position still
further at the expense of the Company, by granting to himself and his
boon companions the most fertile tracts of land on and near
Manhattan and Long islands. His irregular proceedings, finally brought
to the notice of the States-General by the law officer of New
Netherland, led to his recall in 1637, when he was succeeded by
William Kieft.
Up to this time the history of New Netherland is more or less a
history of the acts of the director, who proceeded more like the agent
of a great commercial institution than the ruler of a vast province. He
assumed to be the head of the agency, and all the other inhabitants
of the colony were either his servants or his tenants. Nominally he
was also directed to supervise the proceedings of adjoining colonies
of the same nationality; but they either died out, like Pavonia (New
Jersey) and Zwanendael (Delaware), or as yet the interests of those
private establishments, like Renselaerswyck (Albany) had not come in
conflict with those of the Company so as to call forth the authority
vested in the director. The relations with the Indians had also been
amicable so far, a slight misunderstanding with the New Jersey
Indians excepted; and the quarrel with the English about the
Connecticut lands having been referred to the home authorities for
settlement, this complication did not require any display of
statesmanship. The province having been brought to the verge of ruin
by Wouter van Twiller, up to the beginning of whose administration it
had returned a profit of $75,000 to the Company, the abilities of his
successor were taxed to their utmost to rebuild it, and his
statesmanship was tried in his dealings with the Swedes, the English,
and the Indians.
The absorption, for their own benefit, of the most fertile lands by
officers of the Company had naturally tended to prevent actual
settlers from coming to New Netherland, and the Company itself had
thus far failed to send over colonists, as required by the charter. The
incessant disputes between the Amsterdam department of the
Company and the patroons of Renselaerswyck over the interpretation
of the privileges granted in 1629, and the complaints of the fiscal[785]
of New Netherland against Wouter van Twiller, which pointedly
referred to the general maladministration of the province, at last
induced their High Mightinesses to turn their attention to it. A short
investigation compelled them to announce officially that the colony
was retrograding, its population decreasing, and that it required a
change in the administration of its affairs. But as the charter of the
Company was the fundamental evil, the Government was almost
powerless to enforce its demands, and had to be satisfied with
recommending to the Assembly of the Nineteen of the West India
Company the adoption of a plan for the effectual settlement of the
country and the encouragement of a sound and healthful emigration.
This step resulted in overthrowing the monopoly of the American
trade enjoyed by the Company since 1623, and in opening not only
the trade, but also the cultivation of the soil under certain conditions,
to every immigrant, denizen, or foreigner. The new order of things
gave to the drooping colony a fresh lease of life. Its population,
hitherto only transient, as it consisted mainly of the Company’s
servants, who returned to Europe at the expiration of their respective
terms, now became permanent,—“whole colonies” coming “to escape
the insupportable government of New England;” servants who had
obtained their liberty in Maryland and Virginia availing themselves of
the opportunity to make use of the experience acquired on the
tobacco plantations of their English masters; wealthy individuals of
the more educated classes emigrating with their families and
importing large quantities of stock; and the peasant farmers of
continental Europe seeking freehold homes on the banks of the
Hudson and on Long Island, which they could not acquire in the land
of their birth. These all flocked now to New Netherland, and gave to
New Amsterdam something of its present cosmopolitan character; for
Father Jogues found there in 1643 eighteen different nationalities
represented by its population. Two other invasions, however, of New
Netherland brought a people likewise intent upon the cultivation of
the soil and trading with the Indians; but they were not such as
“acknowledged their High Mightinesses and the Directors of the West
India Company as their suzerain lords and masters,” and these caused
some anxiety and trouble to the new director.
The first of these invasions, arriving on this side of the Atlantic in
Delaware Bay almost simultaneously with Kieft, was made in
pursuance of a plan long cherished by the great Protestant hero of
the seventeenth century, Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, to give his
country a share in the harvest which other nations were then
gathering in the New World. Various reasons deferred the carrying out
of this plan, first laid before the King in 1626 by the same Usselinx
who planned the West India Company; and not until 1638 did the
South Company of Sweden send out their first adventure under
another man, also formerly connected with the West India Company,
Peter Minuit.
Kieft’s protest against this intrusion had no effect upon the
Swedish commander and his colony, whose history is told in another
chapter. More energy was displayed by the Dutch two years later in
dealing with some Englishmen from New Haven, who began a
settlement on the Schuylkill River, opposite Fort Nassau, and who
were promptly driven away. Laxity and corruption on the part of the
Dutch local director seems to have been the cause of the almost
inexplicable patience with which the Dutch bore the encroachments
made by the Swedes; and not until the government of New
Netherland was intrusted to the energetic Stuyvesant was anything
done to counteract the Swedish influences on the Delaware.
Stuyvesant built in 1651 a new fort (Casimir, now Newcastle, Del.),
below the Swedish fort Christina (Wilmington), the treacherous
surrender of which, in 1654, to a newly arriving Swedish governor, led
in 1655 to the complete overthrow of Swedish rule.
The next two years, to 1657, the inhabitants of the Delaware
territory had to suffer under the mismanagement of various
commanders appointed by the Director-General and Council, whose
lack of administrative talent helped not a little to embarrass the
Company financially. Under pressure of monetary difficulty, part of the
Delaware region was ceded by the Company to the municipality of
Amsterdam in Holland, which in May, 1657, established a new colony
at Fort Casimir, calling it New Amstel, while the name of Christina was
changed to Altena, and the territory belonging to it placed in charge
of an agent of more experience than his predecessors. The remaining
years of Dutch rule on the Delaware derive interest chiefly from an
attempt by comers from Maryland to obtain possession of the country
through a clever trick; from quarrels between the authorities of the
two Dutch colonies brought on by the weakness and folly of the
directors of the “City’s Colony;” and from difficulties with Maryland
which arose out of the Indian question. With the surrender of New
Amsterdam in 1664, the Delaware country passed also into English
hands.
Historians have hitherto failed to give due weight to the attempt
of Sweden to establish this American colony, and to the effect it had
upon the fortunes of the West India Company. The expedition of
1655, although politically successful, not only exhausted the ready
means of the New Netherland Government, but also plunged it and
the Company into debts which never ceased to hamper its movement,
and which afterward rendered it impossible to furnish the province a
sufficient military protection.
But no less a share in the final result of 1664 is due to the second
invasion of the Dutch territory, made about the time when the
Swedes first appeared on the Delaware, by Englishmen crossing over
from Connecticut to the east end of Long Island. The whole island
had been granted by the Plymouth Company to the Earl of Stirling in
1635; and basing their claims on patents issued by Forrest, the Earl’s
agent in America, the invaders quickly settled in the present County
of Suffolk (1640), and resisted all efforts of the Dutch to drive them
off. Prejudicial to the Company’s interests as these encroachments
upon their territory were, they were calculated to call forth all the
administrative and diplomatic talents of which Kieft was supposed to
be possessed; but unfortunately by his lack of these qualities he
contrived to lay the colony open to a danger which almost destroyed
it. The trade with the interior had led to an intimacy between the
Indians and the Dutch which gave the natives many chances to
acquaint themselves thoroughly with the habits, strength, and usages
of the settlers; while the increased demand for peltries required that
the Indians should be supplied with better means to meet that
demand. They were consequently given firearms; and when thus put
on the same footing with the white inhabitants, Kieft committed the
folly of exacting from them a tribute as a return for aiding them in
their defence against their enemies by the building of forts and by the
maintenance of a military establishment. He even threatened to use
forcible measures in cases of non-compliance. The war resulting from
this policy lasted until 1645, and seriously impaired the finances of
the Company and the development of the colony. Equally arbitrary
and devoid of common-sense was Kieft’s administration of internal
affairs. Before the beginning of the Indian war, upon which he was
intent, circumstances compelled him to make a concession to popular
rights, which he might use as a cloak to protect himself against
censure. He directed that the community at large should elect twelve
delegates to consult with the Director and Council on the expediency
of going to war, and when fairly launched into the conflict he quickly
abolished this advisory board,—the first representative body of New
York,—but only to ask for an expression of the public opinion by
another board a few months later in 1643. This, at last disgusted with
Kieft’s tyranny and folly, set to work to have him removed in 1647.
The people had not forgotten that in the Netherlands they had been
self-governing, and had enjoyed the rights of free municipalities.
Although all the minor towns had acquired the same privileges almost
at the beginning of their existence, New Amsterdam, the principal
place of the colony, was still ruled by the Company through the
Director and Council. The opposition which he met from the burghers
of this place was the principal cause of his recall.
The relations of New Netherland with its English neighbors during
Kieft’s administration were in the main the same as under his
predecessors. He continued to complain of the grievous wrongs and
injuries inflicted upon his people by New Haven, but had no means to
do more than complain. The stronger English colonies kept their
settlement on the Connecticut, and established another within the
territory claimed by the Dutch at Agawam, now Springfield, Mass.
The arrival of the new director-general was celebrated by the
inhabitants of New Amsterdam with all the solemnity which
circumstances afforded; and they were pleased to hear him announce
that he “should be in his government as a father to his children for
the advantage of the Company, the country, and the burghers.” They
had good reasons to be hopeful. Petrus Stuyvesant, the new director,
had gathered administrative experience as governor of the Company’s
Island of Curaçao, and while in Holland on sick leave, in 1645, he had
proved his knowledge of New Netherland affairs by offering
acceptable suggestions for the better management of this and the
other transatlantic territories of the Company. His views, together
with instructions drawn up by the Assembly of the Nineteen for the
guidance of the director, were embodied in resolutions and orders for
the future government of New Netherland, which revolutionized and
liberalized the condition of the colony. It was henceforth to be
governed by the Director-General and a Council composed of the
vice-director and the fiscal. The right of the people to be heard by the
provincial government on the state and condition of the country,
through delegates from the various settlements, was confirmed; and
the carrying trade between the colony and other countries, which the
reform of 1639 had still left in the hands of the Company and of a few
privileged persons, was now opened to all, although under certain
rather onerous restrictions.
 The first few months of the new
administration fully justified the hope
with which Stuyvesant’s arrival had
been accompanied. The state in which
Kieft had left the public morals
compelled Stuyvesant to issue and enforce such orders, that within
two months of his assuming the new duties the director of the
Patroons’ Colony at Albany wrote home: “Mynheer Stuyvesant
introduces here a thorough reform.” What the state of things must
have been may be inferred from Stuyvesant’s declaration that “the
people are without discipline, and approaching the savage state,”
while “a fourth part of the city of New Amsterdam consists of
rumshops and houses where nothing can be had but beer and
tobacco.”
Unfortunately for his own reputation and for the good of the
colony, he used his energies not solely to make provisions for future
good government, but he allowed his feudal notions to embroil him in
the quarrels of the late administration, by espousing the cause of
Kieft, who had been accused by representatives of the commonalty of
malfeasance in office. This grave error induced the home authorities
to consider Stuyvesant’s recall; but he was finally allowed to remain,
and in the end proved the most satisfactory administrator of the
province sent out by the Company. It was his and the Company’s
misfortune that he was appointed when the resources of the
Company were gradually diminishing in consequence of the peace
with Spain. He was thus constantly hampered by a lack of means;
and when the end came, he had only from one hundred and fifty to
two hundred soldiers, scattered in four garrisons from the Delaware
forts to Fort Orange, to defend the colony against an overwhelming
English force.
During the seventeen years of his administration Stuyvesant
endeavored to cultivate the friendship of the Indians; and in this he
was in the main successful, save that the tribes of the Mohegan
nation along the Hudson refused to become as firm friends of the
Dutch as their suzerain lords, the Mohawks, were. While Stuyvesant
was absent on the South River, in 1655, to subdue, in obedience to
orders from home, the Swedish settlements there, New Amsterdam
was invaded by the River Indians and almost destroyed. The Colony
and the Company had not yet recovered from the losses sustained by
this invasion, nor from the draft made upon their financial resources
by the successful expedition against the Swedes, when a few tribes of
the same River Indians reopened the war against the Dutch. They
first murdered some individuals of the settlement on the Esopus (now
Kingston, Ulster County), and later destroyed it almost completely.
With an expense at the time altogether out of proportion to the
means of the Government, Stuyvesant succeeded in 1663 in ending
this war by destroying the Esopus tribe of Indians.
The negotiations with the New England colonies for a settlement
of the boundary and other open questions fall into the earlier part of
Stuyvesant’s administration. Although he could flatter himself that he
had obtained in the treaty of Hartford, 1650, as good terms as he
might expect from a power vastly superior to his own, his course only
tended to separate the two factions of New Netherland still farther.
His espousal of Kieft’s cause had, as we have seen, alienated him
from the mass of his countrymen, whose anger was now still more
aroused when he selected as advisers at Hartford an Englishman
resident at New Amsterdam and a Frenchman. He was accused of
having betrayed his trust because he had been obliged to surrender
the jurisdiction of the Company over the Connecticut territory and the
east end of Long Island. Listening to these accusations, coming
together as they did with the Kieft affair, the Company increased the
difficulties surrounding their director by an order to make Dutch
nationality one of the tests of fitness for public employment.
The people had already in Kieft’s time loudly called for more
liberty,—a desire which Stuyvesant in the strong conservatism of his
character was by no means willing to listen to. As, however, liberal
principles gained more and more ground among the population, he at
last gave his consent to the convocation of a general assembly from
the several towns, which was to consider the state of the province. It
was too late. The power of the Dutch in New Netherland was waning;
Connecticut had been lost in 1650; Westchester at the very door of
the Manhattans, and the principal towns of western Long Island were
in the hands of the English; and a few months after the first meeting
of the delegates the English flag floated over the fort, which had until
then been called New Amsterdam.
The magnitude of the commerce of the United Provinces had long
been a thorn in the side of the English nation; for years Cato’s
Ceterum censeo, Carthaginem esse delendam had been the burden of
political speeches. Differences arising between the two governments,
Charles II., only lately the guest of Holland, allowed himself to be
persuaded by his chancellor, Shaftesbury, that this commerce would
make Holland as great an empire as Rome had been, and this would
lead to the utter annihilation of England. There was apparently no
other motive reflecting “honor upon his prudence, activity, and public
spirit,” to induce him to order the treacherous expedition which seized
the territory of an unsuspecting ally.
When the English fleet appeared off the coast of Long Island the
Dutch were not at all prepared to offer resistance, their small military
force of about two hundred effective men being scattered in
detachments over the whole province. Nevertheless Stuyvesant would
have let the issue be decided by arms; but the people failed to
support him, and insisted upon a surrender, which was accordingly
made. They had not forgotten how he had treated their demands for
greater liberty, and they expected to be favorably heard by an English
government. New Amsterdam, fort and city, as well as the whole
province were named by the victors in honor of the new proprietor,
the Duke of York; while the region west of the Hudson towards the
Delaware, given by the Duke to Lord Berkeley and Sir George
Carteret, received the name of New Jersey in compliment to the
latter’s birthplace. Fort Orange and neighborhood became Albany; the
Esopus, Kingston, and all reminiscences of Dutch rule, so far as
names went, were extinguished, only to be revived less than a
decade later.
Although the treaty of Breda, July
21, 1667, had given to Holland (which
by it was robbed of her North American
territory) the colony of Surinam, the
States took advantage of the war brought on by the ambitious
designs of England’s ally, France, against Holland in 1672, to retake
New Netherland in 1673. Again the several towns and districts
changed their names,—New York to New Orange; Fort James in New
York to Willem Hendrick; Albany to Willemstadt, and the fort there to
Fort Nassau,—all in honor of the Prince of Orange. Kingston was
called Swanenburg; and New Jersey, Achter Col (behind the Col).
During the first few months after the reconquest the province was
governed by the naval commanders and the governor, Anthony Colve,
appointed by the States-General. The passionate character of the new
governor may have induced the commanders to remain until matters
were satisfactorily arranged under the new order of things. The
different towns and villages were required to send delegates to New
Orange with authority and for the purpose of acknowledging their
allegiance to the States-General of Holland. All submitted promptly,
with the exception of the five towns of the East Riding of Yorkshire on
Long Island, which, however, upon a threat of using force if they
would not come with their English colors and constables’ staves, also
declared their willingness to take the oath of allegiance. A claim upon
Long Island, petitions from three of its eastern towns to New England
for “protection and government against the Dutch,” and an arrogant
attempt made by Governor Winthrop of New Haven to lecture Colve,
forced the latter into an attitude of war, which resulted in a bloodless
rencontre between the Dutch and the English from Connecticut at
Southold, Long Island, in March, 1674. “Provisional Instructions” for
the government of the province, drawn up by Colve, estranged and
annoyed its English inhabitants, who were declared ineligible for any
office if not in communion with the Reformed Protestant Church, in
conformity with the Synod of Dort. Therefore, when, after the failure
of receiving reinforcements from home, New Netherland was re-
surrendered to England (February, 1674), the States-General being
obliged to take this step by the necessity of making European
alliances, the English portion of the population were glad to greet
(November, 1674) again a government of their own nationality, and
the Dutch had to submit with the best possible grace.
 CRITICAL ESSAY ON THE SOURCES OF
INFORMATION.

O
UR sources for the history of New Netherland are principally the
official records of the time, which must be considered under
two heads: the records of the governments in Europe which
directly or indirectly were interested in this part of the world;
and the documents of the provincial government, handed down from
secretary to secretary, and now carefully preserved in the archives of
the State of New York. Of the former we have copies, the procuring of
which by the State was one of the epoch-making events in the annals
of historiography. A society, formed in 1804[786] in the city of New
York for the principal purpose of “collecting and preserving whatever
may relate to the natural, civil, or ecclesiastical history of the United
States in general and the State of New York in particular,” having
memorialized the State Legislature on the subject, a translation was
ordered and made of the Dutch records in the office of the Secretary
of State. This translation—of which more hereafter—undoubtedly
threw light upon the historical value and importance of the State
archives, but proved also their incompleteness; and another memorial
by the same society induced the Legislature of 1839 to authorize the
appointment of an agent who should procure from the archives of
Europe the material to fill the gaps. Mr. John Romeyn Brodhead, who
by a residence of two years at the Hague as Secretary of the
American Legation seemed to be specially fitted for, and was already
to some extent familiar with, the duties expected from him, was
appointed such an agent in 1841, and after four years of diligent
search and labor returned with eighty volumes of manuscript copies
of documents procured in Holland, France, and England, which were
published under his own and Dr. E. B. O’Callaghan’s supervision[787]
as Documents relating to the Colonial History of New York, eleven
volumes quarto, including index volume. The historical value of these
documents, which the State procured at an expense of about
fourteen thousand dollars, can not be estimated too highly. When
made accessible to the public, they removed the reproach that “New
York was probably the only commonwealth whose founders had been
covered with ridicule” by one of her sons, by showing that the
endurance, courage, and love of liberty evinced by her first settlers
deserved a better monument than Knickerbocker’s History of New
York.[788] Mr. Brodhead was unfortunately too late by twenty years to
obtain copies of the records of the East and West India companies;
for what would have proved a rich mine of historical information had
been sold as waste paper at public auction in 1821. These lost
records would have told us what the Dutch of 1608-1609 knew of our
continent; how Hudson came to look for a northwest passage under
the fortieth degree of north latitude; and how, where, and when the
first settlements were made on the Hudson and Delaware,—
information which they certainly must have contained, for the States-
General referred the English ambassador, in a letter of Dec. 30, 1664,
to the “very perfect registers, relations, and journals of the West India
Company, provided with all the requisite verifications respecting
everything that ever occurred in those countries” (New Netherland).
We cannot glean this information from the records of the provincial
government, consisting of the register of the provincial secretary, the
minutes of council, letter-books, and land papers, for they begin only
in 1638, a few land patents of 1630, 1631, and 1636 excepted. Even
what we have of these is not complete, all letters prior to 1646 and
council minutes for nearly four years having been lost. Where these
missing parts may have strayed, it is hard to say. Article 12 of the
“Capitulation on the Reduction of New Netherland, subscribed at the
Governor’s Bouwery, August 27, O. S., 1664,” insured the careful
preservation of the archives of the Dutch government by the English
conquerors. In June, 1688, they were still in the Secretary’s office at
New York; a few months later “Edward Randolph, then Secretary of
ye Dominion of New England, carried away [to Boston] ye severall
Bookes before Exprest,” says a Report of commissioners appointed by
the Committee of Safety of New York to examine the books, etc., in
the Secretary’s office, dated Sept. 23, 1689. Why he carried them off,
the minutes of the proceedings against Leisler would probably
disclose, if found. They remained in Boston until 1691, when
Governor Sloughter, of New York, had them brought back. Comparing
the inventory of June, 1688 (which states that there were found in
“Presse no. 3 a parcell of old Dutch Records and bundles of Papers,
all Being marked and numbred as yey Lay now in the said
presse,”[789] which, to judge from the number of books in the other
presses, must have been large) with an inventory and examination of
the Dutch records made in June, 1753, under the supervision of the
commissioners appointed by an act of the General Assembly to
examine the eastern boundaries of the province, I come to the
conclusion that the missing Dutch and English records were lost either
in their wanderings between New York and Boston, or during the brief
Dutch interregnum of 1673-74,[790] or perhaps in the fire which
consumed Fort George in New York on the 18th of April, 1741,
although Governor Clarke informs the Board of Trade that “most of
the records were saved and I hope very few lost, for I took all the
possible care of them, and had all removed before the office took
fire.”
The inventory of 1753 shows that up to the present day nothing
has since been lost, with the exception of a missing account-book and
of some things which time has made illegible and of others which the
knife of the autograph-hunter has cut out. It is difficult to say how
much has gone through the latter unscrupulous method into the
hands of private parties. The catalogues of collections of autographs
sold at auction occasionally show papers which seem to have
belonged to the State archives, but it is impossible to prove that they
came thence. An examination, hurriedly made a few years ago, of the
103 volumes of Colonial Manuscripts of New York, showed that about
three hundred documents had been stolen since Dr. O’Callaghan
published in 1866 the Calendar[791] of these manuscripts. The then
Secretary of State, Mr. John Bigelow, published the list of missing
documents, calling upon the parties in possession of any of them to
return the property of the State; and a month later he had the
gratification of receiving a package containing about sixty, of which,
however, only twenty were mentioned in the published list, while the
loss of the others had not then been discovered. A thorough
examination would probably bring the number of missing or mutilated
papers to nearly one thousand. It is equally remarkable and
fortunate, that during the war of the Revolution the records became
an object of solicitude both to the royal Governor and the Provincial
Congress.
The latter, fearing that the destruction of the records would
“unhinge the property of numbers in the colony, and throw all legal
proceedings into the most fatal confusion,” requested, Sept. 2, 1775,
Secretary Bayard, whose ancestor, Nicolas Bayard, also had them in
charge when the English retook New York in 1674, to deposit them in
some safe place. Bayard, struggling between his duties as a royal
officer and his sympathies as a born American, hesitated to take the
papers in his charge from the place appointed for their keeping, but
packed them nevertheless in boxes to be ready for immediate
removal. Sears’s coup de main in November, 1775, and the intimation
that he intended speedily to return with a larger body of “Connecticut
Rioters” to take away the records of the province, induced Governor
Tryon to remove “such public records as were most interesting to the
Crown” on board of the “Dutchess of Gordon” man-of-war, to which
he himself had fled for safety. When called upon, Feb. 7, 1776, by
order of the Provincial Congress, to surrender them, he offered to
place them on board a vessel, specially to be chartered for that
purpose, which was to remain in the harbor. He pledged his honor
that they should not be injured by the King’s forces, but refused to
land them anywhere, because they could not be taken to a place
safer than where they were. “Shortly afterwards,” he writes to Lord
Germain in March, 1779, “the public records were for greater security
(the Rebels threatening to board in the night and take the vessel) put
on board the ‘Asia,’ under the care of Captain Vandeput. The ‘Asia’
being ordered home soon after the taking of New York, Captain
Vandeput desired me to inform him what he should do with the two
boxes of public records. I recommended them to be placed on board
the ‘Eagle’ man-of-war.” The records not “most interesting to the
Crown” (most likely including the Dutch records) were taken with
Secretary Bayard to his father’s house in the “Out Ward of New York,”
where a detachment of forty-eight men of the First New York City
Regiment, later of Captain Alexander Hamilton’s Artillery Company,
was detailed to guard them. In June of the same year, 1776, they
were removed to the seat of government at Kingston, N. Y. Almost a
year later two hundred men were raised for the special duty of
guarding them, and when the enemy approached Kingston this body
conveyed them to a small place in the interior (Rochester, Ulster
County), whence they were returned to Kingston in November, 1777.
From that date they followed the legislature and executive offices to
New York in 1783, and finally in 1798 to Albany, where they have
since remained. In New York the records which were carried off by
Governor Tryon, and had been in the mean time transferred from the
“Eagle” to the “Warwick” man-of-war and then returned to the city in
1781, were again placed with the others. At the instance of the New
York Historical Society, the Dutch part of the State records were
ordered to be translated; and this duty was entrusted by Governor De
Witt Clinton to Dr. Francis A. van der Kemp, a learned Hollander,
whom the political dissensions in the latter quarter of the eighteenth
century had driven from his home. Unfortunately, Dr. van der Kemp’s
knowledge of the English tongue was not quite equal to the task; nor
was his eyesight, as he himself confesses in a marginal note to a
passage dimmed by age, strong enough to decipher such papers as
had suffered from the ravages of time and become almost illegible.
This translation, completed in 1822, is therefore in many instances
incorrect and incomplete; grave mistakes have been the
consequence, much to the annoyance of historical students. Some of
the errors were corrected by Dr. E. B. O’Callaghan, who published in
1849-54, under the authority of the State, four volumes of Documents
relating to the History of the Colony (1604-1799), selected at random
from the copies procured abroad, from the State archives, and from
other sources. In 1876 the Hon. John Bigelow, Secretary of State,
directed the writer of this paper to translate and prepare a volume of
documents relating to the Delaware colony, which was published in
1877; another volume, containing the records of the early settlements
in the Hudson and Mohawk River valleys, translated by the writer,
followed in 1881; this year will see a third, on the settlements on
Long Island; and a fourth, to be published later, will contain the
documents relating to New York city and the relations between the
Dutch and the neighboring English colonies. These four volumes
contain everything of a general and public interest, so that the parts
not translated anew will refer only to personal matters.
These being the official sources of information for the history of
New Netherland, it is proper to inquire whether they are trustworthy
beyond doubt. The charge made by Robert Thorne, of Bristol, in
1527[792] against the “Portingals,” of having “falsified their records of
late purposely,” might be repeated against the Dutch wherever the
claim of first discovery of the country is discussed.
I have already stated that one of the motives, and perhaps the
principal one, for establishing the West India Company was of a
political nature. The destruction of Spain’s financial resources was to
lead to an honorable and satisfactory peace with Holland. Spain relied
for the sinews of war on its American colonies; and we must inquire
how much of the information relating to location and extent of these
colonies had reached the Dutch notwithstanding the Spanish efforts
to suppress it.
Hakluyt says:[793] “The first discovery of these coasts (never
heard of before) was well begun by John Cabot and Sebastian his
son, who were the first finders out of all that great tract of land
stretching from the Cape of Florida unto those Islands which we now
call the Newfoundland, or which they brought and annexed to the
Crown of England [1497].”
 RIBERO’S MAP, 1529.
[This is a section of the Carta Universal of the Spanish
cosmographer, Diego Ribero. It needs the following key:—
1. R. de St. iago.
2. C. de Arenas (Sandy Cape).
3. B. de S. Χρō-al.
4. B. de S. Atonio.
5. Mōtana Vde.
6. R. de buena madre.
7. S. Juā Baptista.
8. Arciepielago de Estevā Gomez.
9. Mōtanas.
10. C. de muchas yllas.
11. Arecifes (reefs).
12. Medanos (sand-hills).
13. Golfo.
14. R. de M[=o]tanas.
15. Sarçales (brambles).
16. R. de la Buelta (river of return).
A. “Tiera de Estevā Gomez, la qual descrubrio por mandado de su
magt el año de 1525: ay en ella muchos arboles y fructas de los de
españa y muchos rodovallos y Salmones y sollos: no han alla do
oro.”
The map, which is described more fully in another volume, has
been the theme of much controversy, it being usually held to be the
result of Gomez’s explorations; but this is denied by Stevens.
References upon it by the Editor will be found in the Ticknor
Catalogue, published by the Boston Public Library. It is of interest in
the present connection as being one of the current charts of the
coast, though made eighty years earlier, which Hudson could and
did take with him. How he interpreted it is not known. In our day
there is much diverse opinion upon its points. Mr. Murphy, for
Welcome to our website – the perfect destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. We believe that every book holds a new world,
offering opportunities for learning, discovery, and personal growth.
That’s why we are dedicated to bringing you a diverse collection of
books, ranging from classic literature and specialized publications to
self-development guides and children's books.

More than just a book-buying platform, we strive to be a bridge

connecting you with timeless cultural and intellectual values. With an
elegant, user-friendly interface and a smart search system, you can
quickly find the books that best suit your interests. Additionally,
our special promotions and home delivery services help you save time
and fully enjoy the joy of reading.

Join us on a journey of knowledge exploration, passion nurturing, and

personal growth every day!

ebookbell.com